With the criminal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried beginning this week, it's easy to look at the collapse of FTX and other similarly high-profile implosions, as well as the general landscape of our current crypto winter, and understand why there is an increased public appetite for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to step in and regulate the crypto space right now.

The SEC's current cases against Bankman-Fried, other FTX executives and Terraform Labs, to name a few, mark a trend going back to the earliest cryptocurrency-related enforcement cases brought by the SEC, which generally revolved around allegations of fraud, Ponzi schemes, misappropriation and malfeasance, and were, only occasionally, paired with a firm's failure to register with the SEC.